1. Field of the Invention
This invention has to do with disk drive suspensions, and with load beams for such suspensions. More particularly the invention relates to modifications of load beam to enable adjusting correction thereof after their manufacture and before their installation into the head stack assembly of a disk drive. The invention products and the adjustment method involve departures from conventional design to better enable suspension load beams to be adjustable in their pitch attitude, and, therefore, to be better able to meet increasingly tight tolerance requirements in the disk drive industry.
2. Related Art
Disk drive data storage devices include a drive disk that is written to and read by a magnetic or optical head that is carried by a slider at a desired proximity to the drive disk by a suspension. The suspension comprises a load beam or load beam and flexure combination and an actuator that shifts the load beam and thus the head to a desired track on the disk. The load beam design ensures that the head is spaced a desired distance above the disk, and imparts a designed gram preload to the suspension to offset the air bearing effects of the rotating disk and otherwise maintain the desired slider flight attitude. The combined load beam and flexure provide the slider with a desired angle of disposition relative to the disk, called the pitch attitude, or pitch characteristic. Intricate forming and metal treating steps carried out on a spring steel blank are used to form the load beam having the intended design values, or very close to them. Even the most meticulous load beam manufacturing methods, however, when carried out over a production cycle of tens of thousands of load beams will produce a fair number of anomalous products that are not within specifications. The correction of these defective load beams is painstakingly difficult and in particular instances presently impossible.